


Deserted

by Nos4a2no9



Category: due South
Genre: Drama, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-18
Updated: 2008-02-18
Packaged: 2018-11-10 22:53:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11136297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nos4a2no9/pseuds/Nos4a2no9
Summary: Benton Fraser found the postcard when he was fourteen years old.





	Deserted

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Speranza, the archivist: this story was once archived at [Due South Archive](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Due_South_Archive). To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I tried to reach out to all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Due South Archive collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/duesoutharchive).

Deserted

## Deserted

  
by Nos4a2no9  


Author's Notes: Many thanks to my fellow book nerd SecretlyBronte for a lightening-fast and very thorough beta. She provided some professional vocabulary, too, and I love her dearly for it. Sorry about those plural/singulars, SB!

Story Notes: For LoneRaven, on the occasion of her birthday.

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Deserted

He found the postcard when he was fourteen years old. Its owner--Marcia Johanson, according to the cancelled postmark--had jammed the card between the pages of a medical textbook borrowed from his grandparents' library. When Ben worked the check-in desk at the Fraser Mobile Library (a modified trailer Ben's grandfather hitched to their pickup truck and towed behind them across the Territories), it was Ben's responsibility to check the books for damage. And when he checked the precious tomes for dampstaining, crumbs, graffiti, ripped pages or torn dust jackets, he would often come across the debris of other people's lives being used to mark the exact points at which they had run out of time or lost interest in the books.

These placeholders were usually the free bookmarks his grandmother mimeographed herself and distributed whenever anyone checked out a book. "FRASER MOBILE LIBRARY," they announced, and below this legend the dates when the library would return to Arviat, Rankin Inlet, Pangnirtung, Iqaluit or Tuk were listed in neatly typed script. Fraser would collect the bookmarks from returned copies of _Little Dorrit_ and _Light Aircraft Repair_ and _The Illustrated History of Chicago_ and, if they were still in good condition, he would place them neatly back on the stack of outgoing bookmarks.

The library's official placeholders were returned in abundance, but he was just as likely to find other impromptu bookmarks stuffed into examples of the library's collection. Borrowers tended to grab whatever was handy, it seemed. He found bits of thread, bird feathers, old receipts, dry tea bags, bank statements, theatre tickets, empty envelopes bearing exotic addresses like Toronto or Montreal, even pages torn from other books. Anything that looked valuable he kept and pinned to a bulletin board above the checkout desk. By the end of each season the board was full of these forgotten placeholders

He kept a special corner of the bulletin board reserved for photographs. People were forever using snapshots to mark their places, and he marvelled at the coldness of the gesture. He would often flip through a returned paperback and come across a family photograph--smiling grandchildren, friends crowded around a cake at a birthday party, a couple locked in an embrace--and feel a wave of anger wash over him. Did people not care about their own memories? He had no pictures of his mother and only a framed formal portrait of his father, which sat beside his bed in a cold glass frame. He could not imagine having so many photographs of family or loved ones that he could casually stuff one into a lending-library novel and forget about it.

But when he found the postcard he was not checking for wear and tear on a book. He had been trying to learn about the effects of arsenic (harmless in small doses, as it turned out) in the medical textbook, and when he flipped a page, there it was. A beach. One long strip of white sand, its white warmth so much richer than snow, blended into waters of the deepest, richest blue he had ever seen. The sea matched the colour of the sky, and a thick green line of exotic jungle plants and palm trees rose behind the sandy white shore. He had read about palm trees and sand, but there were no colour photographs in any of his grandmother's encyclopedias. The beauty of it was unexpected.

The sensuality of the photograph also shocked him. He had found a stack of glossy nudes tucked away in a secret compartment in Uncle Tiberius' trunk last summer, but even those naked women, their eyes lush and liquid beneath old-fashioned haircuts, their creamy thighs spread wide in invitation, could not match the beauty he recognized in the postcard. He hadn't imagined so many different colours could exist in one place. Even in summer the land around Inuvik was barren and muted, dwarf pine and dark green spruce providing only half-hearted contrast against the muddy ground. But in this postcard he could almost feel the heat of that tropical sun baking his skin, the hot sand burning his toes, the soft breeze drifting off the water to cool the sweat that beaded on his skin. He tried to imagine what the ocean must sound like, and when he closed his eyes he thought he could almost hear the sound of waves lapping at that wide, white shore.

When he opened his eyes and looked back down at the photograph, he discovered that he had an erection. This embarrassed him, shamed him, and he tucked the postcard back into the textbook. He closed the book with a decisive snap and glanced around. No library patrons wandered the length of the trailer; no one had been in all day. Ben glanced over his shoulder. The photographs of smiling strangers pinned to the bulletin board were the only witnesses to his humiliation.

He closed his eyes and leaned against the plywood checkout counter, breathing in the familiar odors of binding glue and yellowing paper until the strange throb of arousal faded. He would never encounter a scene like that outside of a dream. He would never walk in hot sand and stare out over an indigo sea. His place was here, in the small communities of the arctic circle, and those colours were not possible in his world of white snow and brown mud and toned dust jackets. He privately suspected that if he were to visit a place like, with its hot sun and vast ocean, he would be unbearably frightened. And so he tried to forget the postcard, tried to forget that sensation of warmth.

Ben slipped from behind the desk, carrying the medical textbook with him. He replaced it on the shelf, not at all tempted to drag the book down to the floor and rifle through its pages until he found the postcard again. Not at all tempted.

That beach lay well beyond the borders of his dull, ordered world, as far out of reach as the moon. He must not forget that.

There was no use in wanting the things you couldn't have.

The smiling, forgotten faces on the bulletin board seemed to agree.

  
 

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End Deserted by Nos4a2no9 

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